Chet Williamson is the author of over twenty novels and a hundred short stories, which have appeared in the New Yorker, Playboy, Esquire, and many other magazines and anthologies. His fiction has been nominated for the MWA’s Edgar Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and his short story collection Figures in Rain (Ash-Tree Press, 2002) received the International Horror Guild Award. Many of his e-books and audiobooks are now available from Crossroad Press.
“CHRIST, HE LOOKS OLDER EVERY YEAR.”
“He is older every year. So are we.”
“Well, hell yeah, but you know what I mean. At least we try to stave it off. I don’t think he even cares any more. Look at him.”
Sybil Meadows took a good look and thought that what she saw was not only sad, it was what could be her own future, which was sadder still. It was shitty enough that here she was, in her early sixties, behind a table at HellCon 4, for Christ’s sake, about to peddle her photos for twenty bucks each. What was shittier was that Glenda Garrison was right next to her.
Glenda was friendly enough, but she could be a bitch on wheels. Her claim to fame had been a series of B-movies she’d made in her twenties and thirties, before her boobs had drooped to where she couldn’t do the nude scenes that had made her such wet dream bait for teenage boys. She’d lucked out with a supporting role as the hero’s mom on one of Joss Whedon’s series that had run for less than a year, but that was enough to let her make a decent living doing the con circuit.
Unlike Sybil, who was happy both to sell and to sign her eight-by-tens from her years in the British series, Donna Darkness, for twenty bucks each, Glenda was a gouger. She charged twenty for the photo and another twenty to sign it or whatever piece of memorabilia anybody dragged in. She sold issues of Playboy with her photo spread (and spread it was) for thirty dollars, and signed it right across her breasts on the first page, for an extra twenty, of course.
Wesley Cranford, whom Sybil now observed as he slowly and methodically set out his various photos and DVDs, marketed similarly to Sybil, selling both photo and signature for a reasonable sum. Of course he, like Sybil, had never made a career out of displaying himself naked, the way Glenda had. On the contrary, the fame of her fellow Briton, such as it was and as far as Sybil knew, was based on only one film, but one that had made an impression on several generations of horror fans.
In 1963, he had played a character named Robert Blake in a low budget version of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” The film had done next to no business when it had opened, but over the years had become a cult favorite and had overshadowed Cranford’s subsequent career, which had consisted primarily of poverty row leads, B-movie supporting roles, and TV one-off appearances. Sybil saw him at various cons on the blood ’n’ gore circuit, and he had been at the three previous HellCons. Two years before, he had even hit on her, discreetly enough for her to pretend not to recognize his intentions, thus letting him down gently. Always a gentleman, he had never tried again.
What Glenda had said was true, though. There was something sad and slightly seedy about Wesley Cranford, a few hairs out of place, an area on his jawline that had escaped the ministrations of his razor, a grease spot on the carefully knotted necktie, the shoes scuffed beyond polishing. He appeared a poor man who dreamed himself rich, or at least carried himself so as to project the illusion of richness to others. He certainly seemed gentlemanly, though Sybil suspected that he drank more than he should.
As if sensing she was looking at him, he looked up from his table, smiled, and gave a small wave. She waved back, then turned her attention to straightening her stacks of photos for the coming mob.
* * *
WESLEY CRANFORD LOOKED DOWN AT THE VARIOUS images of his younger self staring back at him and thought that if Sybil Meadows had only known him thirty years ago, even twenty, she would surely have found him worthy of more than a quick wave. That man with the dark hair and full moustache who stared up so coolly from the studio portrait was the same person who now sat down with a sigh, easing himself into the plastic chair on which he would spend the next six hours, except for bathroom breaks and the frequent standing up for fans who wanted to have their pictures taken with “Robert Blake.”
Cranford patted the left side of his spindly chest to assure himself that his small flask was still there, filled with the bracing single malt scotch that was his sole luxury. A nip or two when no one was looking would help to sustain him through the weekend ahead. He made himself remember that this was the celebrity room and he was a celebrity, no matter how depressed and foolish he felt.
It was whorish, he felt, to peddle images of himself and his signature when he should have been making his money by doing what he had done ever since he was seventeen—acting. None of these fans, who asked him the same questions over and over about Haunter of the Dark, ever asked about his Hotspur and Romeo with the RSC or his Henry V and Coriolanus for the Stratford Festival, about the times he had shared a stage with Olivier and Richardson and Gielgud. But it was no wonder. Whatever took place on the stage was fleeting, transient, while film…
Film went on forever, didn’t it? Cranford pursed his lips as he looked at the piles of Haunter DVDs he was offering for sale: barebones single disc, two-disc special edition with the commentary track he had recorded six years earlier, and now the Blu-Ray, priced at fifteen dollars more. A nearly fifty-year-old film and people still bought them at his inflated prices, just to have him sign the paper inserts tucked into the plastic sleeves, and so that he could smile with their hand on his shoulder as the red lights of the little digital cameras blinked and blinked again and captured fan and star.
His reverie was interrupted by the opening of the main doors into the hotel ballroom and the swift entrance of the fans, most of them in black T-shirts with the blood-drenched logos of current horror movies emblazoned on the fronts. For a moment, flight seemed the most attractive option, but Cranford steeled himself. These people were nothing like him. They had completely different tastes and concerns, yet they were the ones upon whom his survival depended. Were they not to buy his wares, there would be no money for rent or food or single malt.
And now it was time to smile and look approachable and friendly. He felt no dislike for the fans. Truth to tell, he was appreciative of those who remembered his work in Haunter or any of his other, even more obscure films. What was discouraging were those cretins, most often dressed in the height of punk goth “fashion,” and sometimes in horrific makeup and even costumes, who would ask, “So, who are you?”
It seemed an unnecessary question, since the standing placard on his table stated in large print Cranford’s name, and beneath it: “‘Robert Blake’ in HAUNTER OF THE DARK, and star of many other films!” Still, Cranford was always polite and told them the otherwise readily available information, had they had the patience to read it.
The first hour of the con, however, was gratifying for Cranford. He actually had a line of sorts, not as long as Glenda Garrison’s, which he knew would be fairly constant throughout the weekend, and nowhere near that of George Romero, on the other side of the large room. Still, there were two or three people always waiting that first hour, and Cranford smiled and evinced graciousness and gratitude and posed with his arm around their shoulders and collected the twenties as he signed the DVDs and photos.
At last there was a lull when no one was waiting for or talking to him, and he leaned back in his uncomfortable chair, took a quick look around, then had a surreptitious swig of the scotch, savoring the taste of it in his mouth before allowing it to trickle down his throat, smoothly shining its way into his stomach, where it nestled like a warm living creature. And it was as he was sitting there, feeling the scotch inside him, feeling relatively happy with the day to the point where he could forget that there would be hours ahead of sitting there unnoticed and unloved, that he noticed the person in the costume with the silken mask.
A costume in and of itself was nothing in this exhibitionistic crowd. There would be a costume contest Saturday evening, and many of those who would enter were already stalking the halls and ballrooms of the hotel. Some were the more traditional creatures of horror, such as Death with a skull face, cowl, and scythe, or zombies with gruesome makeup effects of chewed flesh and severed stumps of limbs. Others were more fantastical in nature. A tall and slender young Asian woman was costumed as some vampire/demon hybrid whose main purpose in her undead life seemed to be to show as much tanned flesh as possible. A pair of five-foot-long, brilliantly realized leathern wings extended from her exquisitely curved back, and she had held Cranford’s attention for some time when she had walked past his table and chatted with several admirers.
But the attention he had given her was only perfunctory in comparison to that which he gave the person in the yellow mask. There was more to the costume than just a mask, of course. The masquer wore a long robe of pale yellow, nearly the same color as the mask, embroidered simply but richly with stitching of various shades of brown and tan. A red sash contrasted starkly with the gentler colors.
The hands, Cranford thought, had been skillfully made up. At first he assumed they were rubber gloves, like the large monster hands he had seen children wear at Halloween, but the naturalness of the fingers’ movements told him there was more to it than that. They seemed hideously thin, like spiders’ legs rather than fingers, and Cranford wondered if they were purely prosthetic, their motion operated by hands hidden inside the costume.
The feet were equally well constructed, broad appendages covered with a coarse, thick hair that looked as if it had come off a burly animal rather than being made from some rayon fake fur. The claws that thrust themselves from the mass of hair were the shade of old ivory and had an iridescent realism that even extended to blood vessels visible just beneath their surface. Only, Cranford observed, the blood was a sickly green in color. Nice touch.
But what set off the whole ensemble was the mask. It glowed with a faint luminescence, and the eyeholes were pure black—the result, Cranford assumed, of using sheer black material, possibly cut from women’s hosiery. The true novelty was the shape of the imagined head beneath the mask. The many folds were draped in such a way as to give the suggestion of the head of a non-human entity beneath, with features that bulged where human features would have receded, and showed hollows where a normal face would have boasted a nose, a jaw, a forehead. It was, Cranford thought, quite hideous through suggestibility alone.
The hooded person walked slowly through the aisles, seemingly unjostled by the teeming fans, none of whom, Cranford was surprised to see, seemed to pay much if any attention to him. Perhaps, Cranford thought, the costume was too subtle for those whose tastes ran generally toward the gory. The person continued to walk until he or she stood directly in front of Cranford’s table, then turned toward him.
The misshapen head tilted down until whatever eyes were behind the black pits of darkness in the mask were looking at the seated Cranford. Cranford started to give an appreciative chuckle, but it caught in his throat. The friendly smile he had planned likewise departed before arrival. The eyes, or the absence of them, discomfited Cranford, especially when he realized the eyeholes were not on the same horizontal level. The one on the left was an inch below the other, and neither was in the place where one would expect the eyes to be.
Another clever conceit, he thought, intended to bring a further alien touch to the whole. He forced the original smile back onto his face and said, as jovially as he could, “Well, that’s quite a costume!”
The person said nothing. Only the long spidery fingers twitched.
“Are you planning to enter the contest?” No reply. “You should, you know.”
Still there was no response from the masked figure. Cranford made himself look away, out over the throng.
“A lot of excellent costumes here this year, really. Were you here last year?” Cranford didn’t look back at the person. Instead he looked down at his tabletop and adjusted the position of some of the stacks of pictures and DVDs, neatly aligning them and aligning again, as though he were trying to find the perfect marketing feng shui. He kept his head tipped down so that he couldn’t even see the figure of the standing person.
He was planning to say, Well, I’m sure you’ll want to see some of the makeup tables in the other room when he looked back up again, but when he did the masked figure was gone. Cranford’s gaze darted about the room, but the yellow-robed countenance was nowhere to be seen. Cranford was relieved, yet puzzled. How could the man have gotten away so quickly and silently?
Practice, he wryly told himself. Yellow alien stealth ninjas must practice a great deal. Cranford shook off the feeling of unease and made himself grin, but took another large sip from the flask just the same and felt better as a result.
Six o’clock finally arrived, and Cranford tallied his take. It was nearly fourteen hundred dollars, which meant that he’d sold an average of a photo or a DVD every five minutes. Not bad. Saturday morning, with its new influx of fans, might be even better.
He pocketed his stash and thought about dinner. Sybil, God bless her, invited him to dine with her and Glenda Garrison. He could have done without Glenda, but he wanted the company, so they walked outside and crossed the plaza to the Italian restaurant in the suburban hotel complex where the convention was held.
The walk was cold, and he was glad he’d worn his coat. Overhead the sky was bright with stars, jutting out like pinpricks on black velvet. Inside, the food was acceptable (though the menu offered only a few Italian items) and the conversation could have been worse. Sybil was always lovely to be with, though Glenda’s coarseness dismayed Cranford. Still, the shots of scotch he’d had that afternoon, another double in his room before dinner, and two glasses of Chianti with his meal loosened him up until he could chuckle at Glenda’s crude jokes.
He did discover one thing he had never known before, and that was that Glenda had actually been in Haunter of the Dark, in the small role of the girl on the altar, the sacrifice that the villain was making to bring back the Old Ones. Cranford had never met her because her scenes were shot separately and then edited in.
“I was underage,” Glenda recalled as she sipped her fourth glass of wine, “so my Mom hadda be there and there weren’t any guys allowed except the director and the crew. I had as little on as they could get away with, but it was colder’n hell—we shot it outside—and my nips were stickin’ up like crazy, and it was before the ratings system, so the director… who was it?”
“Tom Newton,” Cranford said.
“Yeah, him… he put this gauzy stuff over the lens. You couldn’t even tell who it was in the finished shot, so I don’t put it in my whatsit, my filmography…” She slurred the word.
“Weren’t you in the credits?” Sybil asked.
“Yeah, as Felicia Freeman. ’S before I decided on Glenda Garrison. One letter away, y’know? Eff-Eff, Gee-Gee? So anyway, nobody knows, and I’ll jes’ keep it that way.”
They were finishing their coffee when Gary Busey, who had been to a number of cons Cranford had attended, noisily entered with several cronies and went directly to the bar, only a short distance from their table. “Well, ladies,” Cranford said, throwing down enough cash to cover his meal and the entire tip, “I suggest we depart before the situation grows… abuseyive.”
“I dunno,” Glenda said, “I think he’s still pretty hot.”
“Glenda dear,” Sybil sighed, “you think Paul Lynde is hot. And he’s dead and gay.”
Nevertheless, Glenda remained behind to chat up Busey, while Sybil and Cranford left the restaurant. Back at the hotel, Cranford suggested that Sybil might want to join him for a nightcap in the hotel bar, but she smiled sweetly, he thought, and pleaded tiredness.
“It’s a longer day tomorrow,” she said, “and I’m not in my… twenties anymore.”
He smiled. “I suppose you’re right. Nor I. Well, goodnight. Maybe breakfast tomorrow?”
“Lovely. Around nine? I’ll knock on your door when I’m ready.”
Her tone was friendly, nothing more, but Cranford’s step was a bit lighter as he walked down the hall toward his mini-suite. Once inside, he threw off his coat, jacket, and tie, put the cash he’d made that day into the room safe, and poured himself a libation of single malt. Then, drink in hand, he sat down in the easy chair, put his feet on the hassock, and looked around the spacious room.
The hotel was one of the Wyndham chain, a new, modern building that appeared as a giant curved slab when viewed from the outside. Now, for the first time, Cranford was surprised to see that the interior of his room was curved as well. The wall with windows had a definite arc to it, and for some reason it seemed a bit disorienting.
Maybe it was just the scotch, he thought, as he looked away from the wall and sought the TV remote. He flicked it on, found the on-screen directory, and saw that Turner Classic Movies, his favorite, was available.
And there, miracle of miracles, coincidence of coincidences, was Haunter of the Dark, in gorgeous murky black and white. And there was Wesley Cranford in his early thirties, the moustache as dark as the tuft of chest hair that protruded from the V of “Robert Blake’s” opened shirtfront. Those days were gone all right. Hairless chests for men were de rigueur, and what they called manscaping was the norm. Thank God he’d missed that. He turned off the room lights, took another sip, and raised the volume so his ears could catch the dialogue.
“…seemed to be alien geometries, not of this world,” Blake was telling his friend Howard Carter, who had been written into the script as a bow to Howard Lovecraft, the story’s creator, to provide a human villain, and to avoid Blake’s having to convey most of the exposition in monologues. “Curved lines where straight lines should be, curving up into a hideous darkness, Howard! And down again into a primordial slime…”
The camera moved slowly in as Blake continued his story, and Cranford remembered having to project in words alone what the special effects of 1963 could not—and could not afford—to show. The film had been made on a minuscule budget, the producer/director Tom Newton refusing to even pay rights to the publisher who claimed to own the original story. “Public domain!” Newton had insisted. “I did my homework! Public domain!”
After the film was in the can, the publisher had threatened to take Newton to court, so Newton had made a token payment “just to shut ’em up,” as he told Cranford at the time. When it came to promotion, Newton had made William Castle look like a piker, and they had pushed the hell out of the movie, but to no avail. It barely made back the original pitifully small investment in its first two years, but started showing up on television in the ’70s, and as H. P. Lovecraft grew more and more popular, Haunter grew its own healthy fan base. With the advent of VHS tape and then DVD technology, the film had made a small fortune, not for Newton, who had died of a stroke in 1978, but instead for the studio to which he had sold it lock, stock, and barrel years before his death.
Wesley Cranford didn’t own the slightest piece of the film that had brought him what little fame he had, so he had to profit from it the best he could, in an associational manner, buying copies in bulk and getting a small discount, then selling them signed for more than retail price at the cons. It was a living.
He tried to forget the business angle and let himself become involved in what was taking place on the TV screen. Blake was talking to the frightened Italian girl now, asking her about the deserted church and the dead bodies that were found on its grounds over the years. Italian, my ass, Cranford thought. She was Jewish, her name was Sheila Feldstein (not Amanda Paris, as it read in the credits), and she had almost become the second Mrs. Cranford, had he not caught her behind a set fellating a key grip the last day of the shoot.
Cranford became lost for a moment in erotic memories of the woman, but popped back into the story when he saw himself opening the box with what had been called the Shining Trapezohedron in the story and original screenplay, but which Newton had changed. “A trapawhozis?” he had asked the screenwriter. “Nobody knows what the hell that is—call it the Sorcerer’s Stone, f’crissake…”
“It’s simple, Robert…” he heard Kelvin French, who had played Howard, say. “When the stars are right, at certain places on the earth, the gate can be opened by certain sounds, timbres of certain voices crying out the words that will call the Old Ones. I have tried, but in vain. It may be you they want… you they need. You may be the appointed one! Take the stone…”
Then came the scene of Howard teaching him the chant, one he hadn’t forgotten, even after all those years. It was a mishmash of words from different Lovecraft stories, the same kind of mashup the screenplay had been, and he and Kelvin French had memorized it together during drinking bouts and repeated it jokingly for years afterward whenever they ran into each other. The whole thing went:
Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Tekeli-li! Ngah’ng ai’y Zhro! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! Iä!
Cranston closed his eyes and repeated it back to himself perfectly. Damn, he still had it. Still sharp as a tack. If only his face and body were what they used to be…
He thought some more about Sybil, watching with only half an eye the boring scene with the police talking about the kidnapped girl. He perked up at the scene that followed, with a pubescent Glenda Garrison seemingly clothed only in strips of cloth on the altar, but try as he might, he could neither recognize her face nor detect a trace of erect nipple. He chuckled as he heard Kelvin chant the old words, and just as the darkness rose to engulf the horrified Howard Carter, betrayed by those he sought to free and worship, there was a knock on the door.
It startled Cranford, as he expected no visitors. He considered ignoring it and continuing to watch the film, since his big scene was coming up, the one where Robert Blake is tempted with eternal life if he takes Howard Carter’s place and uses the Sorcerer’s Stone to open the gate for the Old Ones.
But the knock came again, a single but inexorable rap, and the unlikely but appealing idea crossed Cranford’s mind that it might be Sybil, looking for company, a drink, or even, dare he imagine, more. He set down his scotch, pushed himself erect, and walked slowly to the door, the large-screen television providing enough light for him to easily make his way.
When Cranford put his eye to the peephole, he felt his heart give a slight hop, for there, on the other side of the door, he saw Sybil Meadows, smiling and giving the same little wave she had given him when she’d seen him earlier that day, as though she knew he was watching her. He threw back the security latch and opened the door.
It was not Sybil Meadows who faced him in the hall, but the person with the yellow mask, still in costume, hands at its side, spider fingers twitching ever so lightly. The dark eyes seemed to observe Cranford, and for a second he felt as though he had fallen into those offset pools of ebony, that his head had been strapped to a board, his skullcap removed, and that his every thought and dream and fear was visible to the creature that now stood before him.
Then he shook himself both outside and in, and took a deep breath. This was absurd, ridiculous, and downright rude. How had this man, if man he was, gotten his room number in the first place? Was he with the convention? Whoever he was, he had no right to come knocking on Cranford’s door at night.
“Now look,” Cranford said, and his voice sounded small to him, as though the cloth-draped figure sucked in the words as they were spoken. “That’s quite a splendid costume, as I said earlier today, but I’ve no time to play dress-up and go boo, all right? I don’t know how on earth you got my…”
Cranford’s words trailed away as the misshapen head of the creature (for such he had come to think of it) shifted beneath the mask, the protuberances and hollows ebbing and flowing as though a hand was randomly squeezing a rubber bag filled with rocks and gel. Cranford backed away into his room, and the creature followed. It did not occur to him to try to slam the door against it. He had the feeling that would do no good.
“The darkness has come. It is time…”
At first Cranford thought the echoing voice came from the creature that followed him, the door closing behind it in spite of the fact that he hadn’t seen either of the spidery hands push it shut. No, the voice was coming from the TV, where Robert Blake was standing on a studio precipice, looking at a huge black screen on which was being projected swirling planets and stars.
“You are the appointed one. Speak the words,” the voice commanded. “Bring back the Old Ones…”
The voice itself was that of Richard Shepherd, a voiceover specialist whose deep baritone had sold everything from used cars to feminine hygiene products in the ’50s and ’60s. Cranford recalled Tom Newton saying he had paid him fifty bucks to come in and record the three minutes of dialogue, as if that had been munificent beyond belief.
All those details flooded back into Cranford’s mind, as if in an attempt to keep him from coming to the obvious conclusion that this was no horror fan following him into his room, but something else, something not even human.
“The stars are right… and this is one of the places on this world where, if the words are said by the appointed one, chaos will be unleashed. You are the one! Behold the stars in the darkness of night!”
The right arm of the thing in the mask slowly rose, and behind him Cranford heard the ratcheting sound of the curtains being drawn open. The creature made an imperious gesture just as Richard Shepherd’s echo saturated voice ordered, “Behold, I say!”
Cranford turned, unable to resist, and through the wide curved window he saw not a parking lot where bright lights shone down on parked cars, but a cosmic vista of Kubrickian proportions, in which suns, stars, planets seemed bound together by a feathery chain of stardust, wan and sickly tendrils of green-gold light. Then he heard his own voice, decades younger…
“No! No, I won’t!”
And again, Shepherd saying, “You must! And look at what you gain!”
But instead of the shoddily filmed insert of Robert Blake wearing a cheap crown and sitting on a throne with plastic planet models orbiting him on strings, Cranford saw the wisps of star stuff transform into a bas-relief of his own face, only young again, young and handsome, his flesh firm and clear, with not a trace of the broken veins that decades of drink had caused.
Wesley Cranford young. Young, oh young…
“Speak the words!”
Cranford heard them inside his head and knew he could recite them easily. What would be the harm? This wasn’t real, was it? It had to be a dream, just a foolish dream, the result of exhaustion and too much to drink and seeing a boy in a silly costume. He began to speak…
“Iä-R’lyeh… Cthulhu fhtagn…”
And when he finished, perhaps the logic of the dream would make him young…
“Iä, Iä… Shub-Niggurath…”
And in his dream, maybe Sybil would come to him…
“Tekeli-li… Ngah’ng ai’y Zhro…”
And maybe then, maybe…
The chant was finished. Cranford could feel his heart pounding in his chest, beating harder and faster than ever before. The cosmic landscape through his window blurred, softened, faded until he saw lights, cars, trees beyond the parking lot, and he wondered, was the dream over?
Then he felt the thin, wiry fingers of the creature in the mask close upon his shoulder, gently, lovingly, and the tempo of his heart quickened until muscle and bone could no longer contain it.
* * *
SYBIL MEADOWS FINISHED ARRANGING HER PHOTOS and looked around the room. It was dismal. There were fewer than half the number of tables set up this year than there had been for HellCon 4. She supposed she should have been surprised that there were that many.
What with the new wars in Iraq and Pakistan causing the reinstatement of the draft for everyone under thirty-five, the devastatingly fatal Muslim flu pandemic, the Dow falling below 2000, and the new government dedicating all its dwindling resources to impeachment and internal prosecutions, horror didn’t have much of an appeal anymore. Still, there were those diehards who had some discretionary income left, though Sybil had dropped her price for photos to fifteen dollars this year and planned to go to ten, depending on the response.
She half smiled, half grimaced as she saw Glenda Garrison enter the ballroom, dragging her luggage cart filled with cases of photos, DVDs, and Playboys behind her. No gofers for HellCon 5. “Hey, honey!” Glenda called as she came up to the table next to Sybil’s. “Partners again, huh?”
Sybil nodded. “A bit different atmosphere from last year, though.”
“You got that right. It’s like somebody opened up a can of whupass on the world. Jesus, honey, it’s insane out there. But how you doin’? God, I haven’t seen you since you blew outta here early last year. You were the one who, uh…?”
“Yes. I found him.”
“So like what happened? I mean…”
“It was Saturday morning. I was supposed to get him for breakfast. He didn’t answer, but his door was ajar, so I went in, and… there he was.”
“Heart attack, huh?”
“Yes. I don’t think he had any pain. He looked very much at peace.”
“Aw…” Glenda looked over at the ballroom door through which the few actors and writers were slowly trickling. “Ohmigod, not to change the subject, but there he is.”
“Who?” Sybil asked, seeing a young man with three people around him, carrying what she assumed to be cases of his items for sale. The man seemed to be in his mid-twenties and was extremely handsome and stylishly dressed. A black moustache accented his perfectly straight, blindingly white teeth. Sybil recognized him then. “Blake Dexter,” she said.
“Uh-huh,” Glenda murmured. “God, is he hot. And huge. Kid comes out of nowhere—complete unknown—and gets a role in the biggest horror movie in years? Like a fairytale.” She gave a twisted little smile. “Wonder if the prince has a princess yet…”
As if he’d heard her, Blake Dexter stopped talking to his entourage and looked in their direction. He smiled and gave a short wave.
Glenda grinned broadly and waved back. “Didya see that?” she said to Sybil. “He waved at me!” But Sybil wasn’t sure which of them the young man had waved at. It didn’t really matter. They were both far too old for him.
But as she looked at him more closely, she wondered. His skin and body were young, but even from a distance his eyes were old, as though he harbored a guilty sadness with which he was unable to cope.
“I’m going up to my room, freshen up a little,” Glenda said, still eyeing Blake Dexter across the large room. “Never know when you might meet somebody, right? Hey, what room you in?”
“324,” Sybil said. “You?”
“349,” Glenda replied. Sybil flinched, just a little. “What?” Glenda asked.
“Nothing.” There was no point in telling her that 349 had been Wesley Cranford’s suite the previous year.
While Glenda was gone, Blake Dexter looked over toward Sybil several times, but never came closer. At last Glenda returned, her lipstick redder, eye liner blacker, makeup base thicker. Even so, she looked shaken, almost pallid. “You okay?” Sybil asked her.
“Fine. Just ran into one of those costume creeps. Made my skin crawl.”
“Another zombie?”
“Nah, just a newbie in a yellow hood—never saw him before. Couldn’t see his eyes, but he was acting like he wanted to… oh I dunno, just creeped me out a little…” Glenda stopped talking, opened her cases, and started lining up her goodies on her table.
Sybil could hear the crowd of fans chattering outside the ballroom door now. Though smaller in number than the year before, they sounded excited and enthusiastic. One of the volunteers opened the door partway to let the mob get a look inside before allowing them to enter.
Sybil glanced at her watch. One minute till opening. She sat behind her table, took several deep breaths, and waited for the door to open wider and the chaos to be unleashed.